A purpose-built wedging table is an additional expense you might want to avoid. If this is the case, then don’t stress. There are many inexpensive ways to find the perfect clay wedging surface for your studio. A wedging surface needs to have a bit of grip on it. If it’s a very smooth surface like…
If you are starting to glaze your pottery, you may have heard about kiln cookies. What are kiln cookies and why are they important? Kiln cookies, sometimes called patties, are thin slabs of clay just a bit wider than the base of your pottery. You put them under your pots when you are glaze firing…
So, you set your kiln to hold for hours instead of minutes by mistake. You are definitely not the first and you won’t be the last. Perhaps you set it to hold for 15 hours instead of 15 minutes. You are probably desperate to know what happens if you do set a kiln to hold…
There are a number of technical terms used by potters when they talk about firing their pottery. One term you will come across when learning about using a kiln is a ‘hold’ or ‘hold time’. It took me a while to piece together why potters used a hold time. So, I thought it might be…
One of the first things you learn about firing pottery is that it needs to be dry before it’s fired. You may have heard the quaint term ‘candling’ and wondered what it means. In this article, I look at what candling a kiln means and why is it so important. Candling a kiln involves heating…
Sometimes it can take a while to fill a pottery kiln, and no one likes to fire a half-empty kiln if they can avoid it. So, you might have wondered if you can fire bisque and glazed pots together in one load. Here are some things it’s helpful to know… Firing greenware and glazed pottery…
Most of us have been there, your kiln is coming to the end of the cool down, and you are itching to open it up. You may have heard about potters unloading their kilns early. Perhaps this has left you wondering what temperature can you open a kiln without causing clay carnage. This article looks…
Once you’ve made your pottery and fired it you may be desperate to see how it has turned out. You probably want to know how long does it take for a kiln to cool down. This article is about how long you can expect to wait, and what factors affect the cooling time. The time…
Kilns come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. If you have a new kiln, you might be wondering how to use the peepholes. Or perhaps you are having trouble with your glazes and you suspect you can remedy this with the peepholes. Either way, you may have been wondering, when do you close the…